Transitions tend to be fluid at most times. We cross a year, flip a calendar, or turn a diary without a thought. But there are other moments when transitions appear to be caught in a quagmire. The old and the new struggle, and citizens have to find a new language to understand the new.
When one looks at 2024-25, four events stand out. The first is Donald Trump’s return to power. This year, it was announced that Trump was no longer an aberration, but a new establishment of power politics. The encounter with Trump’s announcements is almost pathetic. He is the crudest figure in international politics today. Yet, no one wants to confront the obscenity. Everyone wishes to trade with him because they want to be seen as being realistic and pragmatic.
Trump adds crudeness to obscenity. He recently described the reconstruction of the devastated Gaza Strip as an act similar to building a riviera. To him, it’s a real-estate operation in which people can be easily discounted and citizens, in the demographic and democratic imagination, make little sense. Trump has created a new sense of democracy where the people are no longer important.
The problem in confronting Trump pragmatically is the missing sense of ethics. No major NGO or dissenting group has come forward to say the American government is becoming a global immorality. The silence adds to Trump’s power while he behaves like a mix of a comic-book character and a science-fiction monster.
The third example stands in sharp contrast—the farmers’ strike in north India, in which some senior members of the community declared a fast unto death. The indifference of the regime is stark and expressive. It raises the question whether India as a developmental and modernistic regime has any interest in farming as a way of life. The regime tends to treat the strike as a minor irritation when it should be seen as a major crisis. A civilisational question has once again been emptied out because of the lack of an appropriate ethical language.
The fourth example is the redevelopment of Andaman Islands, where one of India’s great indigenous cultures is being completely destroyed. Indian economists advocating for the Andaman project sound like Trump talking about the Gaza Strip. What one misses is any dissent or protest—a certain richness of scholarship and leadership that would create a different kind of moral involvement and pluralistic debate.
The project is seen as just another development project. What Hannah Arendt spoke about as the banalisation of evil now extends to the banalisation of development. Development can be genocidal, yet is justified in the framework of power politics.
The old ethics that sounded more like a collection of table manners, passive in its execution, will no longer do. One has to first confront the challenges to the current model of ethics.
First, the problem of memory. Strangely, in the age of information, memory has become problematic. It is not just the question of oral memory in a textual society. Erasure, indifference and forgetting are built into society. Words like obsolescence ensure that huge sections of the population are easily abandoned. The very language of social science and development today facilitates genocidal transition. Genocide today is easy to digest because those obliterated are easy to forget. The language of modern politics facilitates the act of forgiving.
The second problem is that a lot of ethics is articulated in expert language. People forget Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich’s poignant argument that iatrogeny is a criminal act ignored as expertise. The question of expertise has become a barrier to ethics, access to which should be a right for every citizen.
It is in this context that one would like to argue that ethics should be the initiative of civil society groups, professionals, NGOs, feminist groups and aesthetic designers. All of them should be part of this collaborative, visioning exercise. The new ethics should be seen through the prisms of swaraj and swadesh, where the vernacular and the global are systematically considered.
Philosophers have suggested four criterions for modern ethics. It should be a general-purpose activity that can feed our expertise, but can no longer be dependent on it. It has to be innovative to consider sticking to older models; school books will not do. Jesuit schools had created moral science and socially-useful productive work textbooks that discussed these questions. Ethics should go back, playfully discuss and reclaim these efforts of pedagogy.
Ethics cannot be passive. An ethics that is only correct in the way of table manners is no longer adequate. When evil has become inventive, goodness can no longer be static. Goodness needs to reinvent the exemplar, which in turn has to create a performative ethics, which cannot but be high drama.
Ethics also has to be experimental. We have to welcome the tentative and the futuristic. We have to make do with unsettled presentations till a full futuristic philosophy is articulated.
Finally, ethics has to be every person’s. The exemplar and the paradigm have to meet again and again for ethics to be renewed. Ordinary languages can no longer be fetishised. One needs linguistic, religious and scientific innovation to sustain modern ethics. The ‘storyteller’ has to return to popularise it.
One thinks of organisations like the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, where each scientist became an ethicist to understand the direction of research. One needs to create a plurality of pugwashes today to sustain ethics. One also needs a language of translation so that ethics is understandable across cultures. One of the new responsibilities of Unesco should be ethics, not just aesthetics. Democracy has to make ethics a part of its everyday language and responsibility.
This is the real challenge that can make the unfolding year a meaningful one. A society that lacks ethics lacks the verve to make transitions into the future. Civil society, especially NGOs and universities, must make a new world of citizenship where the good combines with the true and the beautiful.
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations